Too broad or too narrow? Apple multitouch patent sparks debate

The US Patent and Trademark Office has awarded Apple a patent that describes …

Apple has been awarded a multitouch user interface patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office—a patent that has sparked debate among Apple watchers regarding whether it's broad enough to concern Apple's competitors or not.

The patent itself was filed in 2007 and describes methods for interacting with a webpage or other screen element using one or more fingers, depending on what the user is trying to do. For example, one finger might be used to scroll or move the screen around (a la moving the map around on Google's mobile Maps page), while two fingers might be used to pinch or zoom on certain details within that page or element. The patent doesn't go into much detail on the GUIs on the device that hosts the screen elements, nor does it expand its description to explain other forms of multitouch functionality.

The immediatereaction from much of the blogosphere was to declare the patent overly broad and a possible threat to other smartphone makers that make use of multitouch. PC Magazine, for example, cited an unnamed source who claimed the patent gives Apple "ownership of the capacitive multitouch interface the company pioneered with its iPhone." That source also went on to say that the patent is "likely to produce a new round of lawsuits over the now-ubiquitous multitouch interfaces used in smartphones made by the likes of HTC, Samsung, Motorola, Research in Motion, Nokia, and others that run operating systems similar in nature to Apple's iOS, like Google's Android."

A number of patent experts who spoke to Macworld seemed to agree that the patent may be a bit broad, but the VP of law policy at the Computer and Communications Industry Association Matt Schruers hesitated to declare that it wouldn't hold up in court. Instead, he suggested that other companies may begin trying to strike deals with Apple. "Patents like this create uncertainty, which generally leads to negotiations," Schruers said. "Patent lawyers for Apple show up with a big stack of accordion files, Google’s lawyers come with their stack, and back-room patent cross-licensing begins."

Others disagree, arguing that the patent isn't nearly as broad as it seems upon first blush. Nilay Patel, intellectual property lawyer and former Engadget editor (now at This is my Next), told Ars that the patent's claims are "fairly narrow." Patel notes that they require single-finger scrolling along with reprinted scrolling within a frame on a website (think an embedded Google Map, like our example above). "Also, it only applies to Web browsers on mobile devices, not multitouch in general," Patel said. "[B]asically no one's read the claims carefully enough." (Patel has written more analysis on the patent at This is my Next.)

A blog called Litigating Apple is also on Patel's side, writing: "You don't have to be a patent attorney or a paranoid Apple competitor to understand that this patent doesn't afford Apple broad patent coverage over all capacitive multi-touch interfaces."

What's clear is that Apple's recent moves to aggressively defend its intellectual property has left everyone on edge—so much so that even the narrowest of patents are now receiving extra scrutiny from experts and non-experts alike. After all, the company is currently involved in legal battles with Samsung, HTC, and Motorola, though it recently settled its patent dispute with Nokia. It's too early to tell whether Apple plans to use its new multitouch patent to its legal advantage, but we expect that Apple's competitors will be keeping an eye on the company.

Both opinions miss the point that you should not be ABLE to patent something like this - mainly because it isn't "something" at all - it's literally just an idea. Saying "it needs a touchscreen thus it's a real patent" is nonsense.

And the open talk of backroom deals being the solution to the uncertainty and damage to innovation is just priceless....

Regardless of how specific a case this patent is targeting, the patent itself is still bad. There's nothing terribly innovative about the claim being made (scrolling a subwindow,) and mostly what you get is just more interference in the market. Yet another bullet point for Apple to fire at their enemies.

When I was an undergrad I did a little site design and implemented a basic JavaScript + CSS menu system. About a year later, the small business owner forwarded me an email claiming that we were infringing upon his patent for drop-down menus. The email was full of typos, I informed the man that every character of my code was written by hand and that the whole thing stank of a shake-down. We never heard from the troll again but it drove home (for me at least) the ridiculousness of software patents. While I doubt the man in question legitimately had a patent on dropdown menus, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that somebody somewhere does.

When I was an undergrad I did a little site design and implemented a basic JavaScript + CSS menu system. About a year later, the small business owner forwarded me an email claiming that we were infringing upon his patent for drop-down menus. The email was full of typos, I informed the man that every character of my code was written by hand and that the whole thing stank of a shake-down. We never heard from the troll again but it drove home (for me at least) the ridiculousness of software patents. While I doubt the man in question legitimately had a patent on dropdown menus, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that somebody somewhere does.

Patents need to be reformed not removed completely.

Someone should not be able to sit idly wait for a "hit" piece of software to come out and proceed to rip it off.

Someone should not be able to sit idly wait for a "hit" piece of software to come out and proceed to rip it off.

Well, they can't. If you just rip someone's software off they can sue you for copyright violation. If someone makes software that does exactly what yours does, that's not "ripping it off" but competing.

Someone should not be able to sit idly wait for a "hit" piece of software to come out and proceed to rip it off.

Well, they can't. If you just rip someone's software off they can sue you for copyright violation. If someone makes software that does exactly what yours does, that's not "ripping it off" but competing.

I think he is implying that you are basically patenting the idea then let someone else actually impliment it and steal it or sue them. There are plenty of copyright trolls out there that are CRing ideas, and doing virtually nothing with them and then hammering out lawsuits when a big company with some real money manages to impliment the idea, then they pop up and "SURPRISE LAWSUIT" whomever it was.

Someone should not be able to sit idly wait for a "hit" piece of software to come out and proceed to rip it off.

Well, they can't. If you just rip someone's software off they can sue you for copyright violation. If someone makes software that does exactly what yours does, that's not "ripping it off" but competing.

Competing? Not exactly. The US PTO's purpose us to protect the intellectual property of innovative entities. If that innovation is an interface, so be it. The confusion is where we should draw the line between "competition" and "flagrant copying." I'm not defending Apple, but who are you to say what IP should be classified as "competition?"

Having said that, I agree with a previous commenter who said that the patent process needs to be reformed. Too much sh*t passes for "innovation" these days (apparently seeds, bacteria, and other things found in nature can be patented. Ugh)

The tragic part of all this is that the Supreme Court just confirmed that for anyone to overcome this patent, they will have to use a very strict standard "clear and convincing", making it almost impossible. The only way to fix it is through congress, but they're afraid of hurting an industry making tribillions of dollars in America, so they'll never do anything.

The right thing to do would be for Apple to just let this patent go. Don't use it, except in self-defense. Don't go around aggressively attacking others. Don't pretent you can patent obvious simplistic and useful ideas just because you know the system and have the lawyers to use it. Anyone who reads this should read up on the tragedy of software patenting. Then cry.

Can anyone tell me, with a straight face, that multi-touch scrolling would never have happened if not for Apple?

Because otherwise, this violates the spirit of patent law. Patents are meant to create an incentive for the creation of technologies that would otherwise not be created without patent protection. If multi-touch scrolling would happen without patent protection, then it doesn't deserve it.

To me, what is covered in this patent is not innovative, but obvious. It doesn't represent the hard work of Apple's engineers researching how to use a touchscreen, but instead represents prior art (a touchscreen) and it's logical use. When you touch something on a touchscreen and move your finger along the screen, you expect the item you touched on the screen (the web page in this example) to move the same way. Thats... what a touchscreen is for... That's like trying to patent the action of grabbing a mouse with your hand and moving it down to scroll a web page. Not patenting the mouse itself, but the action of touching it and moving it to move something on the screen in the same direction, i.e. what a mouse was intended to do in the first place.

It deserves a patent if it takes something fairly obvious, and then makes it better in a non-obvious way.

The automatic horizontal/vertical scroll lock for example, which disables 360° scrolling if you're mostly scrolling up/down or left/right, for example. That's smart, and that deserves a patent.

Using two-finger scrolls to move the contents of a frame, rather than the surrounding page. Also smart, unique, and an improvement on the state of the art.

Things like this solve problems and constitute innovation. In 2007, gestures we now take for granted were still unsolved problems. And here is where Apple's engineers solved some specific problems. They rightly deserve patents.

WebOS and other platforms enjoy similar protections for genuine innovation.

The patent system has problems, but this patent is not a symptom. It's how things ought to work.

Can anyone tell me, with a straight face, that multi-touch scrolling would never have happened if not for Apple?

Because otherwise, this violates the spirit of patent law. Patents are meant to create an incentive for the creation of technologies that would otherwise not be created without patent protection. If multi-touch scrolling would happen without patent protection, then it doesn't deserve it.

Your underlying premise is faulty. I suggest you go watch this video a few times. Patents are rewarded to the people who get their first, not whether or not something would be created at all.

Others disagree, arguing that the patent isn't nearly as broad as it seems upon first blush. Nilay Patel, intellectual property lawyer and former Engadget editor (now at This is my Next), told Ars that the patent's claims are "unfairly narrow." Patel notes that they require single-finger scrolling along with reprinted scrolling within a frame on a website (think an embedded Google Map, like our example above). "Also, it only applies to Web browsers on mobile devices, not multitouch in general," Patel said. "[B]asically no one's read the claims carefully enough." (Patel has written more analysis on the patent at This is my Next.)

I read Patel's post, and I am still not clear as to the meaning of his statement to you about unfairly narrow. Unfair to who? More narrow means they are more easily worked around, as noted, so that makes them more fair, or less unfair depending on your POV, to other companies, and Apple decided on the narrowness of the claim, so it certainly isn't unfair to them.

Can anyone tell me, with a straight face, that multi-touch scrolling would never have happened if not for Apple?

Because otherwise, this violates the spirit of patent law. Patents are meant to create an incentive for the creation of technologies that would otherwise not be created without patent protection. If multi-touch scrolling would happen without patent protection, then it doesn't deserve it.

I'm sure the patent office will get right on that after they figure out how to do research in alternate universes where each invention never happened.

The automatic horizontal/vertical scroll lock for example, which disables 360° scrolling if you're mostly scrolling up/down or left/right, for example. That's smart, and that deserves a patent.

I disagree. I think it would be too easy for more than one person, in parallel, to come up with the idea of locking the scroll of a page in that way. It's very similar to a dead zone. In that respect, you could consider it just putting two existing technologies together, something which is at least supposed to be explicitly not patentable.

deet wrote:

Using two-finger scrolls to move the contents of a frame, rather than the surrounding page. Also smart, unique, and an improvement on the state of the art.

Something like that isn't that hard for anyone implementing a touch screen to come up with. You could do it with two fingers, or do it with a double tap and hold/scroll, or a number of other ways. It's all just implementation of existing technology, and not something new. Again, it's too easy for two separate parties to come up with that in parallel.

Is this article written in french? NO. So stop shoving french phrases into the friggen article. SANS, A LA. NO

Jealous that the author has a bigger vocabulary than you?

I think I ran into this guy outside the McDonald's in Paris, shouting about how they wouldn't accept U.S. dollars.

Not to mention "sans' is Middle English and in use since the 14th century and "a la" was first used in 1589. English has quite a few words of French origin when the Norman French William the Conqueror invaded in 1066. It wasn't until the reign of King Henry V of England in the 15th century that English came back into use in official documents.

So if you wanted to get all the French out of English you'd be losing several thousand commonly used and very old words.

I ask because Apple is merely using the system within its own guidelines, and the 'gatekeeper' role played by your patent office has ruled this a valid patent. The patent is fine within your laws, so if you disagree with it, you must look to change your laws.

Who's written to their senator? Impotent forum whining is... well, impotent. It achieves nothing more than a nice venting into what is largely an echo chamber.

Multi-touch is one of those ideas that is so obvious that you feel like you've been using it all along once you try it, but think back to the first time you tried an iPhone or the first time you showed it to your friends. Everyone in my circle wanted to try pinching and pulling because they had never seen anything quite like it before.

On the hand it's an awful lot like that interface in Minority Report from five years earlier.

The automatic horizontal/vertical scroll lock for example, which disables 360° scrolling if you're mostly scrolling up/down or left/right, for example. That's smart, and that deserves a patent.

I disagree. I think it would be too easy for more than one person, in parallel, to come up with the idea of locking the scroll of a page in that way. It's very similar to a dead zone. In that respect, you could consider it just putting two existing technologies together, something which is at least supposed to be explicitly not patentable.

deet wrote:

Using two-finger scrolls to move the contents of a frame, rather than the surrounding page. Also smart, unique, and an improvement on the state of the art.

Something like that isn't that hard for anyone implementing a touch screen to come up with. You could do it with two fingers, or do it with a double tap and hold/scroll, or a number of other ways. It's all just implementation of existing technology, and not something new. Again, it's too easy for two separate parties to come up with that in parallel.

So where were all these parties easily coming up with this stuff in 2007? On a touchscreen, in the very large cellphone market?

The intermittent windshield wiper is also ridiculously obvious. Damn straight it deserved to be patented.

Good; now there shall be plenty of opportunity for almost everyone from every sphere of life.

If you are the negotiating type; you shall get ample opportunity to excercise it. The more devious and underhanded and cunning you can get, the greater the rewards shall be.

If you are the type who does not want to give in and is hopeful to try the route of justice in the land of the free; then you too are in luck here. You have just been provided with a new battleground. Try your tactics and find that needle in the haystack that will turn this ruling in your favor!

If you are fedup with the systeml but don't have the financial muscle to counter an attack; you can always continue to sell your stuff in markets elsewhere; nobody gives a damn to these idiotic patents outside of US.

And then you have groups like EFF, Consumer Protection Agency, Annonymous, (yeah, I am making these up, but you get the idea) - groups and agencies which are out there doing the job the government ought to be doing - that is, to safeguard the interests of the public. You can try knocking their door to see if they would like to take up this fight.

Yeah - you have all of the above except the simple and the obvious and the common-sense-option; the ability to tell your democratically elected government what is that you - the people - want; which in this case would be: stop these idiotic patents.